The Chronic Dev-Team has just released Absinthe 2.0.1 that contains some minor bug fixes.

Chronic Dev-Team member, Nikias Bassen (@pimskeks), twitted that this update fixes a hang that could occur in certain situations. So, if you already jailbreak your device using 2.0 version there is no need to jailbreak it again with Absinthe 2.0.1. If you have problems downloading Absinthe 2.0.1 from greenpois0n’s site you can download it from our modding and jailbreak section.

Great news jailbreakers, Absinthe 2.0 untethered jailbreak is finally released! Check the video tutorial after the break.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJW3svICLT8

This release has been a large collaborative effort between Chronic-Dev Team and iPhone Dev Teams (Jailbreak Dream Team). Absinthe 2.0 untethered jailbreak supports firmware 5.1.1 ONLY and is again one of the easiest jailbreaks to use.

Absinthe 2.0 supports the following devices: iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPhone 4 CDMA, iPhone 4S, iPad 1, iPad 2 Wifi, iPad 2 GSM, iPad 2 CDMA, iPad 3 Wifi, iPad 3 CDMA, iPad 3 Global, iPod 3G, iPod 4G, AppleTV 2. Support for iPad 2,4 will be added at a later date. Apple TV 3 is not supported with this jailbreak

For more info and download visit our iPhone modding and jailbreak section.

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The Nokia Lumia 900 is the top Windows Phone made by the Finnish phone manufacturer and probably the best Windows Phone handset on the market. On the other side we have the best iOS handset, the iPhone 4S. Which one is better? Which one suits you more?

Check the video comparison of the two devices after the break.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoQCvdsmQXY

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Mobile Games Marketing research company Newzoo has released some interesting figures about the UK’s mobile gaming market. It seems that the number of mobile gamers in the UK has increased by 18% year-on-year to 23.9 million people, with 75% of gamers playing on smartphones and 17% playing on tablets.

More interesting maybe is that over a quarter (27%) of all UK gamers – (4.9 million people) – play on an iPhone, with an additional 3.4 million people playing games on an iPod Touch and 2.9 million using an iPad.

Figures released for March of this year show that Apple iOS devices earned 94% of mobile revenue generated by the top 200 grossing games across Apple and Google application stores. Most of this money is spent on in app purchases instead of the actual purchase of the game.

Peter Warman, CEO of Newzoo, said “When analyzing Apple’s successful monetization, there is one dominant factor outside of differences in audience demographics and preferences: Apple requires users to connect their credit card information directly to their account, thus creating a seamless purchase experience. I can hardly imagine any other company in the world that would be able to get away with this, including Google and Microsoft. Facebook can come a long way but Amazon clearly has the best chance and is proving this as we speak. The Kindle Fire, being the runner-up tablet in the US only 3 months after launch, has single-handedly doubled Android’s share of revenues in the US compared to European countries. It will do the same in the UK soon after launch, but the rest of Europe might be a different story.

How much do you spend a month on in app purchases?

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AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson shared his views this week on the iPhone, Unlimited Data Plans and his worries about Apple’s free SMS service iMessage.

The New York Times reports that Stephenson said he wished the company had never offered an unlimited data plan for the iPhone and that he loses sleep over services like iMessage.

“My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat,” he said in the on-stage interview at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference on Wednesday. “And it’s a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.”

Notably, the switch from unlimited to tiered data has provided AT&T with $6.1 billion in data revenues during the last quarter alone.

“You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model,” he said. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”

Stephenson added that he didn’t regret the decision to support the iPhone.

Do you use iMessage to save on your monthly data bills? Let us know in the comments.

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Reuters are reporting that Sprint CEO Daniel Hesse will take a massive pay cut this year after upsetting the companies shareholders by subsidizing the Apple iPhone.

Sprint has invested a massive $15 billion to purchase 30.5 million units of  iPhones over the next four years. Shareholders and investors are dissapointed in the high subsidies Sprint are paying on the devices even though the subscription base has increased.

Hesse has agreed to cut his salary by $346,000 in incentive pay that he has already received and he will forgo further payments due to him  for his 2011 and 2012 incentive plans.

Hesse added: “These voluntary actions regarding my personal compensation, which total $3,250,830, will eliminate any benefit for me to the discretionary adjustment the compensation committee made earlier this year,”

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Yesterday, Samsung has officially announced the Galaxy S III at Unpacked Event 2012 in London and they revealed the first television commercial for its latest smartphone. Guys at GuidaiPhone put side by side video of Samsung’s Galaxy S III one minute long commercial and iPhone 4 S 30 seconds commercial. Is Samsung trying to hide something?

Check the video after the break.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDzCrBeNEg8

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Last week, Gameloft teased N.O.V.A. 3, the latest title in the Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance series. Today, they have released a new gameplay trailer which reveals a first look at N.O.V.A’s multiplayer.

Check the gameplay video after the break.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZIcFNBiadc

The game includes six game modes, six maps, 10 weapons, vehicles and customizable characters. N.O.V.A 3 will be released this month for Android and iOS devices, though no specific date was mentioned in the teaser video.

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We all know that Steve Wozniak is a tech hound if it has buzz around it in the tech community he buys it. He is one of the few people that has a Segway, so it was not that surprising when he bought a Nokia Lumia 900. The real question is how does it like it so far?He normally doesn’t comment on devices as a rule but he broke this rule and did an interview with aNewDomain.net’s.

So what’s the verdict on the Lumia?  This quote pretty sums it up.

 iPhone is my favorite phone. I did give my opinion that the Windows 7 phone had superior visual appearance and operation cues that were also more attractive. In my opinion, it sets the mark for user interface. I would recommend it over my Android phones given that it doesn’t yet have the breadth of apps. I surmise that Microsoft hired someone from Apple and put money into having a role in the UI and appearance of some key apps. I also surmised that Steve Jobs might have been reincarnated at MS due to a lot of what I see and feel with this phone making me think of a lot of great Apple things.”

That is a pretty glowing endorsement of Windows Phone from Woz. Naturally he wouldn’t trade his iPhone for it but that didn’t stop him from recommending it over Android.

Perhaps the most glowing endorsement is the fact that Woz surmised that “..Steve Jobs might have been reincarnated at MS due to a lot of I see and feel”

Here are a few other quotes that WP Central got  from the interview:

“Just for looks and beauty I definitely favor the Windows Phone over Android”

“….I’m just shocked, I haven’t seen anything yet that isn’t more beautiful than the other platforms”

“Intuitive and beautiful”

“it’s makes me feel ‘Oh my gosh, I’m with a friend not a tool’” (In regards to the animations and graphics)

“I just really like the experience and will be carrying the Windows Phone everywhere”

Apps look just “more beautiful than on Android or iPhone”

Want to hear the full interview?  You can check it out here.

This is pretty big news for both Nokia and Windows Phone Woz’s opinion carries a lot of weight in the Tech community which leads me to ask, will his  endorsement of Windows Phone cause you to look at the OS more seriously?

With all the talk lately about the “cloud storage” and how wonderful it will make our lives as mobile users according to the “experts” I was wondering how does it work in real life?

Lets be honest here…for the most part there was very little need for cloud storage in the past most phones (expect for the iPhone, Thanks Apple for starting that trend.)  had a Micro Sd card slot. If you ran out of memory at anytime you could simply pop a higher capacity memory card in and magically you had room on your phone again!

Than somewhere in the last couple of years this slot went out of vogue with phone manufacturers and we were told you could now put all of “excess” music, photos, movies, etc… on the cloud and it could be accessed anytime you wanted to.  But the question remains why would these slots be pulled from phones? I am thinking that first it’s cheaper to build a phone without it, and phones could be made thinner too. (because 9 mm thick is just to unacceptability thick..lol)   My guess here is manufactures made a bet that most consumers would not use more than 16gb of memory on their phones and therefore most consumers wouldn’t care.

While this may be true for most consumers, there are a bunch of us out there who use their phone for EVERYTHING and love to put all of our music on it, pictures to show our friends/family, apps to push our phones to their limits, games to pass the time, and even a few books and movies.  For those who really use their smart phones 16gb (or 8gb more recently) just isn’t enough.

While the cloud is a reasonable answer to this problem it has a few major pitfalls.

1. Limited Data Plans: Just as the phone manufacturers decided to take away the Micro Sd Slot the carriers decided to take away the unlimited data plan. Now a limited plan of 2 to 3Gb is norm, This is fine for normal web browsing, email checking, social network check ins etc… but if you tack on hours and hours of streaming music, a few DVR’d TV shows, and perhaps a streaming a movie or two your data plan is shot.
2. No 3G,4G /EDGE Network Only: This may come as a shock to everyone that lives in the cities with 4G/LTE but there are still large sections of the country running on EDGE internet coverage only.  Streaming music of any type does not work on EDGE it can not be download fast enough to keep pace with the music. This translates into choppy music that stops to buffer every six seconds or so. You don’t even want to think about trying to stream video on it.
3. Spotty Coverage: Again once you get outside of major populated areas or major highways cell coverage tends to come and go which makes any type of cloud retrieval impossible.
4. Battery, Battery, Battery: With today’s modern smartphones getting thinner, the screens getting bigger, the background connections becoming more and more frequent just to keep apps up to date, the batteries on phones are getting pushed harder and harder to do “basic” functions.  While battery technology is advancing everyday it is not enough to keep up with the demand of today’s modern smartphone users.  Add the cloud into the equation not only will your phone have to play the music, or video you want, it will also have to use more power to download it while it’s doing it.

With all these problems that the cloud faces in mobile use it brings some immediate questions to mind.

Will these things I mentioned above affect a large portion of the phone buying population? No, probably not just because they will never use more  storage than is on their phone.

Does this mean that these items are not real long term issues that need to be addressed? No these issues are real problems that should be addressed and corrected so that the consumer can make the most out of cloud storage.

Will these these issues be addressed? My gut feeling is probably not.  If there is not a MAJOR outcry from the consumer the manufacturers will do what is best for their bottom line.  Which is produce the thinnest smartphone they can in the cheapest way possible and guess what?  Big milliAmp batteries and Micro SD slots fly in the face of both of those.  As for the carriers the days of unlimited data are all but gone and are not coming back.

The Bottom Line Here is This: Cloud storage can be a wonderful tool to sync your phone with your laptop, your tablet, your home computer, etc…  It could be a wonderful tool to get access to things on your phone that you would never have such ease of access to without it.  However, it being sold as something more than it was/is intended to be, it is being a sold as a storage replacement on your device which just for practical reasons it just can not be.